


taste your lips of wine

by metonymy



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Cunnilingus, Dreams, F/M, Female Ejaculation, Oral Sex, subconscious attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 03:53:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4691063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonymy/pseuds/metonymy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur's never told Ariadne that he wants her, but she can tell - mostly because he's started to manifest it in the details of his dreams. She takes matters into her own hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	taste your lips of wine

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the following prompt by an anon on Tumblr: " Arthur's unspoken attraction to her starts to manifest in the details of his dreams (her scarf pattern on drapes, the colour red showing up, etc.) It's on the edge of getting out of hand when Ariadne decides fuck it, she's going to seduce him."

At first, Ariadne thought she was imagining it. 

The worlds she built for jobs always had a certain amount of flexibility in them; one had to allow for slight changes and influences from the dreamer or it would be too brittle and crumble without warning. And things tended to leak through anyway. The music on a radio might be a favorite tune of the dreamer's. The books on a shelf would be scraps of random memories and thoughts or jumbled words. Art on the walls might be their favorite paintings or images of their favorite places.

So Ariadne didn't think much of it when Arthur's dreams shifted slightly. He always favored a more clean and modern line, and when she designed for him she tended to work in that flavor anyway. He liked things to be simple and elegant and favored neutrals - she thought it was more about remaining unnoticed than his actual taste, but she never bothered to ask him about it. When hints of a rich, deep red started to appear, she was - not surprised, that felt like too strong a word. She noticed. The carpet of a restaurant she'd designed went from a nondescript taupe to a crimson. But she didn't say anything, because they were working. And nobody seemed to notice or mind, so what was the point? Arthur only glanced downwards before continuing on to check the escape routes through the kitchen. It didn't mean anything.

There was the time they were in an office building, the very personification of forgettable, fluorescent lights buzzing inaudibly, and Ariadne caught a whiff of familiar scent. In her growing experience, dreams tended to be odorless and anodyne, one of the few really good tells that she was dreaming even before she tried to change anything. Adding smells on purpose rather than suggesting them via the setting was complicated and thought to be near impossible. She'd tried adding them in a few of her wilder experiments, but not on a job like this, not on a bog-standard corporate espionage job where they were trying not to leave an impression. And yet she could smell perfume. The threads of rooty iris and clove and amber that she knew so well drifted through the air, comfortable and faintly spiced like it was every morning when she spritzed a couple of sprays on her neck before tying on the day's scarf. Or - no, more like it smelled later in the day, the amber warmly vanillic and the clove piquant beneath it. The extractor had a faintly puzzled look on his face the whole time they ran through the layout, but Arthur's point-man mask never slipped. 

He never said a word about it, really. Sometimes Ariadne would have sworn she'd imagined that kiss on the Fischer job, that Arthur's attitude towards her was nothing but an easy and comfortable friendship. That it wasn't the pattern of her floral scarf in the curtains of the hotel room she'd constructed. That there wasn't a familiar march of Greek keys bordering the rug. That the center of a fountain in an office park didn't shift into a bishop's miter for just a moment. Was it worth it to break up such a great partnership for things she must have been imagining? Maybe it was just a strange echo when she seemed to hear the melody of the song she'd been humming before they went under. Maybe she'd just brought in her own memories. Maybe it was nothing.

There had to be a last straw, of course, and it came on a practice run on yet another job. The wide, low couches of the hotel that she'd designed - opulent and inviting - had been replaced with an odd assortment of furniture. One couch was narrow and square, dark leather that she could distinctly remember from the Fischer job and the time that they'd - Ariadne shut that thought off immediately. Another was now a beat-up old sofa from two jobs ago, where she'd been sketching while Arthur did research and accidentally fallen asleep on his shoulder. At the time Arthur had brushed off her apologies with a small smile, but now she was starting to wonder. And the third was now a pair of lawn chairs, battered and dingy, one of them graced with a cushion. And then she blinked and they were back to her design as Arthur walked up beside her, hands in his pockets and a faint hint of red at the tips of his ears. Eames turned the corner and Ariadne bit down on the comment she'd been about to make, knowing this wasn't the time.

Instead she waited till after the job when they'd left the city and arrived in another one and checked into a hotel. And she went down to his room and knocked on the door and waited until he'd let her in to open her mouth and say:

"Why didn't you just kiss me again after the Fischer job?"

It was possibly not the best way to broach the subject, and Arthur was standing in front of her shoeless and tieless with his collar splayed wide and his sleeves rolled up. For once his silence seemed to be pure speechless shock rather than the guarded reticence of a man who knows how to keep his mouth shut.

That was kind of the problem.

Arthur swallowed and closed his eyes for a moment and looked down at her. "I tricked you into that first one. I thought you were holding it against me."

"I wasn't," she said, stepping closer. "I thought you regretted it so I never said anything. But I probably should have."

Arthur swallowed again. "This is about - look, it's unprofessional, I know. I'll stop it, I swear."

Ariadne took one last step till she was practically pressed against him, looking up into his dark, dark eyes. "There's a simple solution to this, Arthur," she said, reaching up to touch his cheek, then sliding her hand to the back of his neck.

She hardly had to pull him down to kiss her. His hands settled on her waist and tugged her till she was flush against him and his lips met hers. The kiss wasn't soft and gentle and chaste this time; his tongue delved into her mouth, he tasted her, his teeth nipped lightly at her lower lip, like he'd been storing it all up and the pressure had been building and it had only escaped in those patterns and fragments in the dreams and now the lid had been blown off.

He pulled away to catch his breath, looking down at her with a slightly bewildered smile. Maybe she should have said something. Something reassuring, something about how long she'd wanted him. Instead Ariadne reached behind her neck and undid her scarf. Arthur immediately stooped to nuzzle against her throat, breathing in her perfume, leaving a line of kisses along her collarbone and then setting his mouth to her shoulder. Ariadne gasped when he bit down, and she was pretty sure her knees actually turned to water as the shock traveled right through her down to her clit, and Arthur actually laughed against her skin as she clutched at his shoulders to keep herself up.

Then his hands slid down to her hips and it seemed completely natural to hoist herself up, and Ariadne found herself being carried to the bed. She had one last thought, looking over his shoulder as she clung to him and laughed: her scarf looked much better on his floor. And then he was laying her down on the bed to stretch beside her and Ariadne lost herself in more of those perfect kisses. He tasted like bad coffee and smelled like he'd just washed his face and she could feel how warm he was beneath his shirt. These weren't details she'd pulled into a dream. She hadn't known until now what he felt like, the way his legs were so long and lanky when one knee was nudging between hers, the border between his soft throat and the faint prickle of his stubble. So many tiny things she'd never have known. 

He mumbled something and she pulled back, enough to see his face and his eyes intent on hers. "I never regretted it," he repeated, brushing her hair out of her face with gentle fingers. "Kissing you. Not once." 

"Arthur," she managed, "you're kind of an idiot."

He laughed, blessedly, and Ariadne ducked down to kiss his throat and he gasped.

Ariadne didn't need to check her totem. This was her idea. No shifting dream with changing patterns or sudden scents. Arthur was solid against her; all the unfamiliarity was just the new position, a trick of perspective. And yet she could follow each step, the care with which his long fingers pulled off her shirt and slid over her bra, the deftness he usually brought to picking locks and firing guns devoted to undoing hooks and clasps and zippers, until Ariadne found herself lying on the bed and looking down at Arthur looking back up at her from between her legs, his eyes wide. 

"Do you know how many times I dreamed about this?" he asked, tracing over the seam of her underwear. Ariadne swallowed hard.

"I'm guessing a lot," she said, raising her hips. "If your subconscious is anything to go by."

Arthur's smile this time was slow, his eyes full of heated promises. He slid her underwear off and tossed it away, settling down and working his shoulders between her thighs, and she slid her calves over his back to hold him in place. It didn't seem like he had plans to go anywhere else, though; his face bore an expression of wonder as he parted her lips with two fingers and bent low to breathe over her cunt. It was light, tickling, teasing. Anticipation made the moment stretch, suspended in time like a bead of amber, perfectly rounded in her memory: the dull gleam of his hair under the light, the smooth weave of his shirt against her bare legs, the hot puff of his breath against her wet, sensitive flesh, the tingle of desire washing over her skin and making her shiver.

"God, you're gorgeous," he muttered, and the spell was broken. She could hardly mind, not when he licked a slow line up one of her outer lips and then down the other. Ariadne realized she was clutching the bedspread in her hands and unclenched her hands, finger by finger, as Arthur kept up those long strokes of his tongue. 

She shouldn't have been surprised that he was as focused and determined in this as he was in everything else, or that he was so patient. He was slow, methodical, and almost careful in his circuit of her cunt, tracing the inner lips now and flickering the tip of his tongue inside her entrance. That made her hips jerk and he chuckled, the buzz against her making her squirm. And Ariadne just wasn't as patient as he was, and finally she put a hand on the back of his head and guided him up just a touch to where her clit was waiting. Arthur chuckled again and laid a kiss on the bud of nerves and it felt just about perfect. She let her hand fall to his shoulder, sighing with pleasure as he started to lick over her clit, then sucked it for a moment before going back to his long strokes, a little firmer now.

Ariadne closed her eyes and let herself fall into the sensation for a while, hands drifting up her body so that she could cup her breasts, thumbs circling her nipples but not pinching or squeezing just yet. She heard Arthur groan and murmur something that sounded like "god, yes, please," and couldn't keep herself from smiling. It was just what she needed to add to his own efforts, the darts of pleasure coursing from her breasts down to her pelvis as he licked and sucked and hummed against her. From the sound of it, he was enjoying it almost as much as she was, making satisfied noises that made her clit thrum with the vibrations and the occasional obscene slurp. 

It felt like he was everywhere at once, tongue laving over her from bottom to top, sliding slippery hot around his fingers, lips forming a ring around her clit as he sucked hard, and somehow without her noticing her body had slipped from enjoyment to the urgent need to come. Her thighs tensed, aching as she ground her hips against his face, and she urged him on, _please, do it, right there,_ to bring her over the edge, and then - 

The weightless, dizzy sensation of her climax left her gasping, fingers tight on her nipples, hips arched against his mouth, and Arthur never stopped. He eased back as she slumped against the bed. But his face stayed firmly between her legs, tongue returning to those long, lazy strokes, then back up to twirl around her clit as she twitched and moaned again, and she found herself asking for more, inside, please. Ariadne cursed and bucked up when he slid one long, long finger inside - she'd always loved his hands, she told him now, and she thought she could hear him chuckling again - and he licked around them and up and down and sucked and took her clit gently between his teeth, the hard unyielding pressure a sharp goad to her own pleasure. 

The crest of the second orgasm hit her like a wave crashing over a swimmer looking back at the shore, smacking against her and leaving her shaking and gasping. Her legs seemed locked around his shoulders and holding him tight, and he scraped his teeth over her clit and then kept to suckling and kissing it, and she couldn't bring herself to push him away even though it felt swollen and hot and oversensitive, and she was coming again, the sensations crackling along her nerves out from her cunt and all the way to her fingertips, toes curling and catching in the fabric of his clothes. 

Arthur didn't stop. Ariadne couldn't find the words to ask him to, lost in a labyrinthine spiral of pure visceral sensation that had her gasping for air and writhing like her body was torn between even more and giving up, keening as she came again and nearly sobbed with it, and she sagged against the bed and let her legs fall, quivering, to either side of him.

It took a while for her to remember anything beyond the pounding of her heart and the ragged stabs of breath, and even longer for her to look down at Arthur. He slowly slid his fingers out - when had he gotten up to three, holy shit - and laid his hand on her thigh, and it was slicker than her own sweat. When he looked up at her the whole lower half of his face gleamed with wet. 

"Shit," she breathed out. Now that she was starting to come back to herself, she could feel a wet spot gathering under her ass and a few final drips from her cunt, and if her face hadn't already been flushed Ariadne would have blushed bright red. Arthur wiped his hand on the bedspread and stood up.

"You're still dressed," she said, tongue feeling thick and heavy in her mouth. He laughed, eyes bright, and wiped his chin with his sleeve. He certainly looked disheveled. Ariadne closed her eyes and decided to concentrate on breathing like she was going to survive the rest of the night. She could hear the rustle of fabric and the clink of his belt as the rush of her own blood in her ears subsided, and then the bedspread slid out from under her - nearly taking her with it, leaving her feet dangling over the edge - and she was left on the cool sheets. A groan escaped her lips almost immediately. Arthur chuckled again, the bed dipping under his weight, and then he was beside her. He tugged her back onto the bed, his hand lingering on her hip.

Ariadne opened her eyes. He looked so different like this, up close, hair thoroughly mussed and falling into his eyes, dimples flashing as he smiled. She managed to roll to her side, her hand coming to rest on his ass. Still covered by his briefs. Huh.

"Not dressed anymore," he said, bashful. "But you seem kind of worn out."

"I think I can manage this," she replied, sliding her hand to the front, feeling his stomach twitch under her fingers as her fingers slipped under the waistband and explored. He was definitely hard, even if he didn't expect her to reciprocate. He leaned in to kiss her when she started stroking him slowly. And he made the loveliest little noise in his throat when he came. 

 

The next time they went into a dream, everything stayed where it was supposed to be.

Ariadne enjoyed being right.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks once again to Josie for the beta <3


End file.
